Trump’s Impulsiveness Has Again Been Mistaken for Something Deeper

Last Wednesday, President Trump made a surprising, curious deal with Democrats. Rather than bow to the wishes of his fellow Republicans by attempting to raise the debt ceiling for six or more months, Trump undercut (for roughly the 15-thousandth time) his baffling reputation as a master negotiator and acceded to Democrats’ demands for a shorter extension straightaway, setting up a fiscal showdown in December that few in his party are looking forward to.

The arrangement was limited in scope and represents a minor victory, at best, for Democrats. But Trump’s supposed apostasy provided a convenient excuse for Republicans to loudly denounce their unhinged president, separating themselves from a man they think gives conservatism a bad name. Their protestations also colored the way the deal was covered in the mainstream press — as some sort of tectonic shift instead of the 1.2 tremor on the political Richter scale it really was.

This gap between the magnitude of the events and the perception of them was evident in media coverage over the weekend. On Saturday, the New York Timespublished an article, pegged to the deal, with the headline: “Bound to No Party, Trump Upends 150 Years of Two-Party Rule.”

“Although elected as a Republican last year,” Peter Baker writes, “Mr. Trump has shown in the nearly eight months in office that he is, in many ways, the first independent to hold the presidency since the advent of the current two-party system around the time of the Civil War.” Baker notes that Trump originally thought of running for president on the Reform Party ticket in 2000, cites Trump’s consistent attacks against fellow Republicans like Mitch McConnell as proof of his refusal to be boxed in by party, and even speculates that Trump will ditch the GOP when he runs for reelection.

The label “independent” implies that a political figure isn’t bound to the dogma of one of the two major parties — and there is very little evidence that this is true for Trump. He did once hold far more liberal views than he does now, and he has been relentless in attacking his own party. But none of that changes the fact that the president has seemed eager to govern as an extreme right-wing ideologue on almost every issue. The notion, popular during the campaign, that Trump would fuse nativist impulses with big-government largesse has fizzled; instead, he has thrown his weight behind hugely regressive tax cuts and massive cuts to Medicaid and abandoned his plan to fix the nation’s infrastructure. (He has, of course, stuck with the hard line on immigration, the one area where he has bucked traditional Republican orthodoxy.)

Another problem with the thesis is that attacking “Establishment” Republicans like McConnell or Paul Ryan hardly counts as aberrant behavior for a bomb-throwing GOPer these days — that kind of behavior has been firmly part of the culture of the party since at least the tea-party wave of 2010. If Donald Trump isn’t really a Republican, what about Ted Cruz or the members of the House Freedom Caucus?

The article quotes Ben Domenech, editor of the Federalist, who says Republicans should not think of Trump as their party leader. But the idea that Trump is some sort of anomalous fake Republican is wishful thinking by Domenech. The GOP base still largely embraces the president, and sides with him, not tut-tutting party functionaries, on his most divisive ideas. The appearance of political independence on Trump’s part is mostly a function of a fractured and dysfunctional party.

Axios’s Mike Allen also seemed ready to accept the idea that Trump’s deal with Democrats marked an epochal shift in the direction of independence. In an item headlined “Why Trump Hopes the New Trump Sticks,” Allen wrote:

A Trump adviser says that after a tumultuous seven months in office, it had finally dawned on the president: “People really f@&@ing hate me.” For someone who has spent his life lapping up adulation, however fake, it was a harsh realization. This is a man with an especially acute need for affirmation.

The question of why Trump would arrive at this realization now, as opposed to any point over the last several years (or decades) goes unanswered.

It’s tempting, as always, to believe that Trump has finally had his come-to-Jesus moment and realized the error of his divisive ways. But the truism that Trump is governed by the need to be loved is belied by the fact that almost everything he says and does is profoundly unpopular. But Trump didn’t win in 2016 by pandering to the average American; he won by tailoring a message for tens of millions of aggrieved white people. And there’s been no real sign since his presidency began, one day’s worth of bipartisanship notwithstanding, that he’s uncomfortable with maintaining that approach going forward.

(Axios also reported over the weekend that Trump will meet with black Republican senator Tim Scott in what could be a “racial reset” after the president’s botched responses to the violence in Charlottesville. It notes that “the moment could be fleeting or consequential, depending on whether Trump realizes that, at 71, he has a lot of catching up to do.” A wild guess: It will be fleeting.)

Almost eight months into his decidedly abnormal presidency, there remains a persistent and surprisingly widespread impulse among political journalists to transmogrify Trump into a traditional president, one who makes decisions based on long-term strategy, one not governed by pure id — a president who has something in common with men who came before him. (Perhaps there’s something comforting in that?)

This impulse animated the never-fulfilled expectation that Trump would “pivot” to a more traditional presidential pose during the 2016 election. It showed up again when Trump kind of, sort of eschewed his nuttier side during Hurricane Harvey. And it has appeared once more, now that Trump has made a very slight gesture toward bipartisanship.

In spirit, Pennywise isn't a murderer or a clown. He's a free-spirited entertainer who has his own way of relating to children. https://t.co/Ov4m4DcBJ7

Yet just three weeks ago, Trump was touting the merits of white supremacists. His dark, Manichaean view of the world is not going to change; nor will his impulsiveness, impetuousness, or any of the other characteristics that make him so ill-suited to be president. Waiting for him to transform into some semblance of a normal human being, much less a president governed by anything beyond impulse, will be a long wait indeed.

Meanwhile, Trump connected Hurricane Irma to the apparently urgent need for “tax reform” — one of the 15 things he does every day that would have counted as scandalous for any other president, but which the country has become so inured to that it barely makes a ripple.

The Pentagon is set to begin a drawdown of its 5,800 troops from the Southwest border as early as this week, the Army commander overseeing the mission told POLITICO today — even as the approaching caravan of refugees prompted U.S. customs officers to close a port of entry near Tijuana, Mexico.

All the active-duty troops that President Donald Trump ordered sent to the border before the midterm elections should be home by Christmas, said Army Lt. Gen. Jeffrey Buchanan, who is running the mission from San Antonio, Texas.

A shooting at a Chicago hospital has wounded multiple people, including a suspect and a police officer, authorities said.

Shots were fired Monday afternoon at Mercy Hospital on the city’s South Side, and officers were searching the facility. Police issued a statement on Twitter saying there were “reports of multiple victims.”

A witness named James Gray told Chicago television station ABC 7 that he saw multiple people shot: “It looked like he was turning and shooting people at random.”

From @presssec: new rules for reporters at WH press conferences.- one question per reporter, then yield floor and microphone.- followup question “may be permitted.” Then yield floor and microphone.- “failure to abide” may result in suspension/revocation” of WH press pass.

so, the conventional wisdom on election night was that democrats had not achieved the resounding repudiation of president trump they were looking for. yes, they’d won the house, but not overwhelmingly. and progressive favorites stacey abrams, andrew gillum, and beto o’rourke had gone down to defeat. meanwhile, republicans had made slight gains in the senate. a few days later, the thinking shifted in Democrats’ favor, as more late-breaking results came in from various states, especially california, which is notoriously slow at counting ballots, and where the party did extremely well. we’re not almost two weeks out from the election, enough time to look at things more dispassionately. how do you rate the performance now?

Trying to get away from the endless and interminable and redundant arguments over how to define a “wave.”

Benjamin Hart3:10 PM

yes, I agree, there is little more tedious than parsing what defines a wave

Ed Kilgore3:11 PM

Democrats won the House popular vote and picked up 37 or 38 seats. Dems won 22 of 34 Senate races (with one in Mississippi still to go), and by just about any measure, more Senate votes. And they picked up seven net governorship and seven state legislative chambers.

Part of the problem is that an insanely pro-GOP Senate landscape made a good Democratic performance look bad.

And the other problem was sky-high Democratic expectations, plus the overwhelming attention given to close races in Florida, Georgia and Texas.

Which all went Republican.

Benjamin Hart3:13 PM

yes, and the pressure to prematurely label the evening one way or another, which is endemic to election coverage (and which I don’t see going away any time soon)

the other thing, I think, is that trump is such an outlier of a person and president that some people view anything less than a sweeping rejection the likes of which we’ve never seen before as a bit of a letdown

Ed Kilgore3:14 PM

Yeah, the commentariat has not adjusted well to the slow counts that ever-increasing voting-by-mail plus provisional ballots have introduced.

As for Trump, I guess part of the polarization over him is that it’s hard for partisans to interpret anything that happens as anything other than total victory or defeat for MAGA. And the MSM tends to respond with quick judgments of a “split decision,” which is very misleading.

Benjamin Hart3:20 PM

yep. haven’t seen TOO much of that since the election, to be fair. but back to the actual gains made by dems, which it’s easy to lose track of amid the hundreds of results. what do you think was their most important victory other than winning the House? for me, it might have been knocking off scott walker in wisconsin.

Ed Kilgore3:23 PM

Guess it depends on your interpretation of “important.” If you mean “soul-satisfying for progressives,” then yeah, finally taking down the guy who had most consistently applied the worst kind of conservative policies to a previously progressive state was a very big deal.

Sweeping Orange County, California’s congressional seats was another big deal emotionally, particularly for those of us old enough to remember O.C. as a John Birch Society hotbed.

From a more practical point of view, all those congressional wins mattered–first, as part of a House takeover, and second, as a foundation for (maybe) a Dem reconquest of the Senate in 2020.

And the gubernatorial and state legislative gains will help with the next round of redistricting, though there’s some unfinished business on that front in 2020.

As I’ve argued at some length, even some losses were important for Dems–particularly the Florida and Georgia gubernatorial elections and the Texas Senate race. They showed that finally “national Democrats” (including African-Americans) can do better in the former Confederacy than Blue Dogs–at least in states with the requisite combination of a large minority vote and some upscale suburbs.

Benjamin Hart3:29 PM

yes, and that may also have big repercussion in terms of what kind of candidate democrats want to nominate in 2020

Ed Kilgore3:30 PM

Well, it certainly reinforces the idea that there’s a “sunbelt strategy” for 2020 that could work as an alternative to Democrats obsessing about the Rust Belt states Trump carried.

Benjamin Hart3:31 PM

right – arizona and georgia really could be in play

and, of course, florida

Ed Kilgore3:31 PM

And North Carolina.

Benjamin Hart3:31 PM

right.

so, all in all, a democratic party that is somewhat addicted to being traumatized should be feeling pretty good

Ed Kilgore3:35 PM

Yeah. There were some painful near-misses, but not really much grounds for a struggle-for-the-soul-of-the-party thing. That’s good, since Democrats will need all their energy to winnow their 40-candidate presidential field.

A Florida elections expert digs into what went wrong for Democrats on Tuesday

This election was the third consecutive Governor’s race decided by a point or less, bracketing two consecutive Presidential elections decided by a point. This drives homes two points: One, Florida, for all its dynamic growth and demographic changes, is very stable; and Two, when organizations like Quinnipiac try to peddle off polls showing candidates in Florida with 6-point leads, or 9-point leads, you now know what to do with that information (a post/rant on public polling is coming soon).

There are a lot of reasons why Florida is very competitive…but it is what it is. Big chunks of Florida cancel each other out, and both parties have large, and quite dug-in bases – and neither have a base that alone gets them to 50% + 1. Winning Florida (or losing it) is about managing the margins throughout Florida.

16 Democratic representatives signed a letter opposing Nancy Pelosi for House speaker … but she still has no announced challenger

… Pelosi could lose as many as 15 Democratic votes when she stands for election as speaker on Jan. 3. One of the 16 signers, Ben McAdams (Utah), is now trailing Rep. Mia Love (R-Utah) and might never cast a speaker vote.

Not signing the letter is Rep. Marcia L. Fudge (D-Ohio), who has publicly opposed Pelosi and is now mulling a run against her. Fudge said Friday she would not make a final decision on whether to run until next week at the earliest.

Another five Democrats — Rep. Conor Lamb (Pa.) and Reps.-elect Jason Crow (Colo.), Jared Golden (Maine), Mikie Sherrill (N.J.) and Abigail Spanberger (Va.) — have made firm statements saying they would not vote for Pelosi but did not sign the letter.

stacey abrams and andrew gillum both conceded their elections this weekend to their republican opponents after protracted post-election battle. realistically, did either of them have any other option but to call it quits?

Zak Cheney-Rice11:47 AM

I think with Gillum the outcome was more or less decided on election night. His race was always more of a long shot than Bill Nelson’s reelection bid — the other high-profile Florida contest that dragged on into last week — and was never as close as that one. But I think it’s important to note that Abrams was pretty intentional about not conceding, in the traditional sense. She basically said, in so many words, that Kemp’s victory would have to stand because she saw no other available legal recourse available. I think she knew her options included dragging this out longer, but also knew that, legally, there wasn’t much she could do to alter the outcome.

But she has said she will continue to pursue issues around election integrity in Georgia, and I think that will include several (more) legal challenges to Kemp’s win, or at least to the mechanisms that facilitated it

Benjamin Hart11:48 AM

yes, she did not praise kemp, and called his win “legal” but refused to say that he was “legitimate” when asked by jake tapper

Zak Cheney-Rice11:52 AM

Yeah the question of legitimacy seems to be a sticking point for a lot of folks. There’s a Slate piece (https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2018/11/georgia-stacey-abrams-brian-kemp-election-not-stolen.html) circulating today arguing that we shouldn’t describe the Georgia election as “stolen,” and the first reason listed is because it could lead more and more people to see American elections as illegitimate. But I think the cat is pretty far out the bag on that one. He’s out and running down the street. I live in Atlanta and there are piles of little cards littering the streets around Piedmont Park (the city’s Central Park equivalent) that read, “Stolen Votes.” There are many, many people who believe this election was ill-gotten. So yeah, I think it is fair to say this wasn’t a legitimate win by plenty of metrics.

I’m not sure what group — activist, political, or otherwise — created the cards, to be clear. But it expresses a widely held sentiment.

Benjamin Hart11:57 AM

yeah, I have to say I’ve been on the other side on that debate – while I think kemp is a dirty character and absolutely employed the underhanded tactics we’ve all heard about, “stolen” struck me as a rhetorical bridge too far, for the reasons that a) it’s an escalation that I’m not sure is useful in the wider context of institutional delegitimization that republicans are pushing and b) we don’t actually KNOW if kemp’s actions swung the election, though we can suspect they did. I’m interested to hear you say otherwise, though.

Zak Cheney-Rice12:07 PM

I think it’s a useful and accurate frame, but it definitely has a veneer of plausible deniability because so much of what goes into “stealing” these elections takes place long before election day. Brian Kemp can always point to the fact that he’s acting well within the law, but it’s important to note these are laws he and/or his party created, likely for this very purpose. If you disenfranchise more than a million people — often for quibbling bureaucratic irregularities — and do so in a way that pretty transparently targets those whose lives are already beset by instability and unpredictability around housing, transportation, and employment, you are essentially creating the electorate you want. In Republicans’ case, that electorate is one skewed toward maintaining white, and conservative, power, at the expense of black voters, young voters, and poor voters (all of which often overlap). So the question of “theft,” it seems to me, is purely rhetorical. In our technical, traditional understanding of elections, we would not necessarily describe elections that took place in the Jim Crow South as “stolen.” But if roughly half of the Jim Crow South’s electorate is either barred from voting outright or forced to navigate an insane labyrinth of inconveniences, barriers, and sometimes outright violence to cast their ballots, it’s a stretch to describe that as legitimate, either.

That is, of course, a matter of differing scale. But it doesn’t take much to tip an election like Kemp-Abrams.

Also, it’s not our job as voters to keep falsely believing our elections are “legitimate” when clearly, in several key ways, the evidence suggests otherwise.

That distinction is earned.

Benjamin Hart12:12 PM

all good and useful points. but I do think the phraseology matters. would you say that the florida election was stolen because of the state’s disenfranchisement of felons?

Zak Cheney-Rice12:24 PM

It does matter, I think, but I haven’t found any of the arguments that dismiss such phrasing as extreme, or bemoan how it sows mistrust in our systems, to be especially convincing. I do believe that locking up black people at disproportionate rates, then ensuring they cannot vote even after they’ve done time, is doing the same work that racist voter suppression does by all the means listed above. It is stealing their right to vote, plain and simple. I think we can have a nuanced discussion about whether that means elections are being “stolen” outright or not (I tend to lean toward yes) but at the end of the day I think the more pressing issue is that we are building our democracy by ensuring people who should be able to vote cannot, and that we perhaps need more urgent language to describe the actual stakes there.

The California union that provided major funding for successful ballot campaigns to expand Medicaid in three red states this year is already looking for where to strike next to expand Obamacare coverage in the Donald Trump era.

Leaders of SEIU-United Healthcare Workers West declined to identify which states they might target in 2020. But the six remaining states where Medicaid could be expanded through the ballot are on the group’s radar: Florida, Mississippi, Missouri, Oklahoma, South Dakota and Wyoming.

NEW: CNN asks court for an emergency hearing Monday afternoon, as the White House still plans to boot CNN correspondent Jim Acosta, despite court order that reinstated the journalist. https://t.co/vrmtazbgcI